


Thursday’s Children

by maddox_lox



Series: Thursday's Children [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-30 21:33:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maddox_lox/pseuds/maddox_lox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Castiel may be separated in Purgatory, but every moment they spend there is about each other. Confronted with constant violence Dean has no way to hide from him self the truth about his feels for the Angel, but can anything like love survive all the blood of Purgatory?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> I'm never sure if i want to write this or not. I started it, and to quote God: It flowed. And it kept flowing. I think about this place often, as i work on other projects, or go about my day. As I make coffee or ride the streetcar. But when I sit down to write it, sometimes, it feels like i'm sharing the secrets of a friend

 

Dawn

 

 

Maybe when you were young your mother told you about a place where babies go if they die in their cribs unbaptized. Their lives like small dreams. Maybe she told you about purgatory. But that place is a myth. A place of temporary punishment for non-mortal sin. That place doesn’t exist. There is nothing temporary in the Black Plain, and in the silver light all punishment is mortal. Eternal.

There are no myths. No stories, no suggestion of Purgatories true nature. A cage of light and mist and black stone. A void of memory and the cadence of time. A steady beat of chaos. Purgatory is immune to prophecy. It negates fate and myth the same way it's black stone negates the touch of the constant silver light from the sky. But if it could be touched by these things, then at least some of its myths would have been about a human named Dean Winchester.

Some of its stories would be about his epic stalk through the Black Plain of bones and dust.  
Some of Purgatories poems would be about Dean Winchester's love for an Angel named Castiel.

 

~

Dean had no way to keep a record of his time in Purgatory. Time itself was slippery and gleaming, hard to look at and impossible keep track of. He preferred to let the days slip off him like water off his back, like blood off his bone blade. There was no paper, no ink, and if he could hold such things Dean would not know what to say, or how to say it. He had never been one for words. But he did not need to put pen to page, he did not need to record the light and dark of his days. Dean fought with all the force of a comet, with all the grace of a cannon ball, he bled in Purgatory and left it altered. Changed.

This it the story of what Purgatory remembers.   
The memory of Dean’s impact on the cage.

 

~

The lab was shining whiter then God. Adrenaline made the lights brighter, the black of the Leviathan’s blood darker, deeper. It pulsed with power, a wave of sound that pulled at his seances. Dean could smell a forest, lightening, the chemical clean of the lab. A forest in a wind storm, black trees twisting followed by long beats of stillness and silence, the while glow of the lab. He pulled his eyes away from the searing rage filled face of the Leviathan and found Cass, standing behind the pulsing dying monster. The smell of lightening grew stronger, Cass’ eyes filled with confusion and locked on his, and then there was only blackness.

Like waking up.  
He was standing in the woods, night low and hard pressing around him. The trees were sharp dark shapes, tangled, confused. He wondered how long he had been standing there. The forest was fragrant, damp, and under it he could smell the slight sharp current of decay and death. A low dark smell. Fear closed around his heart, a place its cold hands almost never reached. He didn’t have to ask, he knew where they were. But Dean asked anyway.

Cass spoke, his voice hard and strangely sad. Resigned.“Every soul here is a monster.”

As he spoke something rustled, breathed a rough breath in the trees around them, drawing closer.

“This is where they come to prey upon each other for all eternity.”

“We're in Purgatory? How do we get out?”

Red eyes flashed, black shapes moved like predators towards them in the night.

“I’m afraid we're much more likely to be ripped to shreds.” _They will come for me, I can feel them even now, fell their anger. Their need. They will tear him away from me, tear him apart to punish me…_

Dean searched Castiel’s face for a moment, large blue eyes haunted by quick shadows of fear. He had never seen fear in Cass’ eyes before, hard and cold. The angel looked at Dean with a kind of alien desperation and the fear in Dean’s own heart bit down harder.

He looked away.

“Cass, I think we better — ” Red eyes creeping forward through the black, and there was the gentle fling sound of feathers. “Cass.” Dean’s voice was weak, a small groan, he did not need to turn and see that he was alone. The angel was gone.

For the first time in life, Dean Winchester ran from the monsters in the dark.

 

~

 

Silver crashed around him as he ran through the black thick night, leaping and flying. Jaws snapped behind him, great leathery hands closing at his back. He ran, terror slamming every door and window in his chest, flooding over his heart. The silvery darkness cut through tree branches, sliced up the path before him in sharp shadows, touched every part of him, fell across him as he ran and made him feel how incredibly hurtable he was, how vulnerable.

He moved forward until only his breath and the sound of his heart followed him. Fear kept his body thrumming like a taut rope. He found a split in a cliff face, a dark maw in the lesser darkness of the forest and slid inside. His back pressed against rock. Trembling, his hands curled into fists.

 

 _The silver sky of Purgatory is like a drug,_ he told himself as he felt it silk silver edges slide inside in his lung. _It amplifies every sensation, slows every sight and sound and explodes them into immense and challenging proportions._

Dean would adapt, a warrior always adapts. Overcomes. But that first night the waves of fear cracked him wide open and he bled panic and guilt into the night. All the wrong he had done to try and do right, all the danger he had created, the blood spilled. And Castiel. Perhaps the worst of all. The only thing he  ever wanted for himself, denied. He closed his eyes against the sharp silver night and tried to forget that he was alone. But the cold cut into him and it was a pale trench coat he imagined, a high cheekbone and a full softly mouth smiling. Abandoned.

Dean wanted to call for him,  
 _Please please…_

  
But he could not find his voice and he did not dare make a sound. He clenched his jaw in silence, and passed his first night in Purgatory, a vulnerable human mountain of fear. He hid through the darkest hours just before dawn, and as the light grew brighter he drifted into an uneasy ragged sleep, a song played on the fraying edges of his dreams. 

Love can never be,  
Exactly what you want it to be.  
Whisper a little pryer for me   
And tell all the stars above….   
This is dedicated to the one I love.

  
But there were no stars in purgatory.

~

  
  
  
Dean learned many lessons on those first days. Lessons in blood. To kill was to live. Every moment a fight, or the breath after one, the breath before. His hands always locked into fists. His first kills were with his bare hands, blood burning his skin. Blood in every colour. Vivid red. Black. Everything bathed in silver. He felt bones break under his hands. He breathed in the constant drifting mist in great gulps and watched everything with a slow agonizing pleasure. A silken cleanness behind the veil of light. Blood had a beautiful sheen in the silver. In the sun light, in the moon light. In the wet black of rain storms.

He walked north or what he thought of as North but was nothing. Nowhere. There was no logic that he could find to the find place, no direction. He felt at times he walked in circles, passed the same petrified trees, encased in black stone their branches twisting in final kisses of heat, the sky grey and unchanging. The trees reminded Dean of the petrified forest his father had taken him and Sam to eons before, in Arizona. It felt like a life time before, centuries. Gods had fallen since then. More then one.

The forest was once lush and alive, growing over a sleeping volcano. One day, his father explained as they walked around the black reaching trees which looked like their own shadows,  the volcano woke up and tossed ash into the air. The ash was so hot it fused with the trees and turned them to stone, standing fossils. As Dean walked though the black stone trees he thought about sleeping volcanos and learned the remarkable cheapness of blood. In Purgatory blood was nothing, the stone could swallow so much of it. He lost track of the days and nights he killed. The shadows of monsters would pass over him and he would stand his ground, feel their blood on his skin. He walked, drinking water that tasted like ozone and lightning in great in dizzying gulps whenever he could find it. He tried not to think about the fact that he didn't need to wat. That he hardly ever slept. He tried not to think of Cas.

He could feel the silver light poisoning him. It made him relish the feeling of blood on his hands, and Dean did not want that deep greed for violence to touch thoughts of the angel. But every step he took he was towards him, in search of him. _Castiel. Castiel._ His name was in the whisper of Dean’s steps, playing in his breath. He tried to drown Cass with the sound of blood hitting the black earth of Purgatory. A damon, fixed red eyes, bleeding in the night appeared in the mist and black web of branches as though at his call. And Dean smiled. He did not wait, the demon opened its scared mouth to scream but Dean was already moving.

Stepping forward, he curled his hands, feeling dry blood crack on his knuckles, and drove a fist into the demon’s belly. The creature had a long curved blade in its hand, and in a few swift movements he caught the demon’s arm, twisted it, kicking the blade free and catching it as it dropped between their bodies, spinning it in his hand as the demon fell and driving it into his falling chest. Dean smiled in the quick moment as the blade found home and he heard the crack of bone. He felt the many small motions as one ling clean sweep, distinct and perfect. He had seen Cass do this once, the grace of the angel’s speed. The thought filled him with a slap of loss and Dean clenched his jaw, pulled the knife free with a savage wrench that brought with the sound of cracking bone.

He knelt, watched the wide shock of pain and rage in the damp red eyes, eyes that searched his before brimming over again with pain, sinking. He listened to the demon’s ragged breathing. A fresh glut of blood poured on to the earth around him. A soft echo filled the demon’s breaths, a whirring panic. The Demon’s heart. A small sound, a small sound in a large empty space, a dim rushing pound, it was overwhelming, almost too intense, even in its quietness. Dean picked up the fallen knife, feeling its weight, blood slick on the handle. It was so easy. He smiled.

“Where is the angel Castiel?” His voice was a whisper, soft, almost tender. A strange and glaring contrast to the save expression on his face, the blood gleaming off his eyelashes.

“There are no angels in Purgatory, whelp.” The demon hissed, a wet rattle in his voice, a sneer of his lips.

The knife found its throat, found its depths. It died drowned in blood. Dean knew this. He knew blood, and flesh. He knew the slide of the knife, the magic angle that divided flesh and bone, life and living. Dying made the demon alone. Wherever it was as it died, it was not on the ground in a small damp copse, its lungs full of blood, its heart empty. Dean preformed a careful dissection. Peeling back the skin of the Demon’s chest, running the underside of its skin across his palms. Amazed that it lived, drew breath and now did not. Blood and death consumed him. Silver delirium settled around him like mist. He tore ribs open with his bare hands, his face sprayed with marrow. The blood that touched his hands and arms and face felt like hands of comfort, long moments of warmth and grace. Pure.

For a moment he forgot Castiel, he forgot his loss, he drank great gulps of the liquid purity of death, and the joy in it.

As the blood cooled so did his euphoria, and in a wave of guilt and disgust as visceral as the murder, Dean fell away from the body. As he walked away, weak from effort and ruin, the knife slipped from his hand and lost himself in the stone woods. Days later, drunk on murder, he came to the valley of the volcano he knew was out there, turning trees to black stone. A wide circular sweep of bubbling rock, smooth and gleaming in an endless faceted black, he felt as empty as its endless sky. Void. The blood on his hands had turned black, his skin itched with sweat. He had killed for days, days spent bleeding, he wanted to rip them apart with his teeth, he made himself a glutton on violence. Despair waited on the endless black plain, and Dean realized that the last few days had ripped his idea of despair, of himself, apart as some pathetic mockery.

Purgatory had shown him true monsters, bloodlust, in a way that not even hell could. As he walked out on the undulating black, the silver sky darkened, an early night and he looked up. The sky hung low with a gathering of black clouds. The sky mirroring the earth he stood on. Peels of thunder rolled above him like a great stone wheel. The air took on a heavy damp smell, fresh and cloying. The undercurrent of rot vanishing so that he noticed it for the first time in days only because its absences. He took deep breaths, the smell of the air comforting and familiar, and Dean remembered.

_Standing by the Impala shining in the night. The air fresh and damp around him._

_“Please...I can't...I need some help. Please?”_

_Dean would deny it. He would pace his agnostic denial, following it through a thousand different blind places. All of his disbelief rooted in a simple thought. Dean’s disbelief building a cage over a deep part of him that shone, that warmed and charged with joy. An angel with black wings, for him. And that night, after Famine had gripped his in a cold empty fist and found… nothing… Dean’s disbelief collapsed. For the first time, in a strange spasm of self reflection, drowning in introspection, Dean realized that he had crushed all the good in him so deeply that not even Famine could find it. Dean wasn't empty, he was hopeless. But perhaps to famine it was the same. The promise of satisfaction, the reason to keep eating, to keep fucking, had become an anathema to him._

_“Please...I can't...I need some help. Please?”_

_And thats what it was, how he felt for Cass, it was good. Because Cass was good, a man and angel who looked at the world and tried, who laboured and lost with a steady quiet dignity. He was everything good that he fought, and so often failed, to protect. And that night, alone by his car he felt tears sting his eyes, and he prayed._

_Not to Castiel, but for him._

The rain poured and washed the blood from Dean’s hands and he remembered the sound of Cass breath, the sound of his voice, like a hundred low voices speaking as one. He was soaked in seconds, water and thunder and lighting lacing through the clouds. He walked until he was clean, exhaustion settling on him, pouring down his shoulders with the rain. And he could not keep thoughts of Cass away, they broke through his sense of loss, his anger, his confusion, his shame in the face of his submission to Purgatory, and his thirll in it, he found hunger.

Hunger for the Angel spreading his wings, shadow and sound, in a barn full of light. The angel reaching out to touch him to heal the blood on his face. His fingers tips resting against his cheek. Cass looking down on him in a dream, the sun on his smile, on the thick dark fan of his eye lashes. Cass filled his mind the way the water rolled down his skin, cool and clean. Lightening filled the black smoky clouds, a beacon, a call. He would find him, in the land of silver light, if he had to walk across the Black Plain from one end to the next. He would find Cass and bring him back, keep him by his side, so they could stand together in the rain, next to the Impala, in the world was the sun was golden.

 

~


	2. Dusk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alone in Purgatory Dean is faced with his first kills, and the reality that Purgatory presents: one of endless violence. As he struggles with how Purgatory changes him, and tried to suppress memories that hunt him Dean begins his search for Castiel.

Dusk

~

 

_Because God commanded it. Because we have work for you._   
The first sight of Castiel was so overpowering, the shock of resurrection still bleeding out of him, the angel’s brand on his arm still burning a hot low hum, that it would be days before Dean could let himself uncoil enough to think over those words. Huge black stones in his mind. Beyond comprehension, and no matter how long he thought over them, laying down on the back of the Impala, a beer sweating in his hands, star light gleaming on the twisted metal of Bobby’s junk yard, Dean could not crack the immensity of it and eventually he gave up and simply watching the stars spin out their long dead light.

He never really understood any of it. Gods and dimensions and ghosts. How it fit into the world of car parts oil on his hands and girls and apple pie. He could never tie them together. That was always more Sam’s territory. Until he came to purgatory. More then Hell, purgatory showed him exactly what it was demons craved when they brought savagery to earth, what spasm of joyous abandon the taste of blood could bring., Its glossy black sheen in the night. Hell was pain, constant frantic. His whole life, Dean know, somehow. Part of him always knew he would go there.

But nothing could prepare him for Purgatory.   
As he walked across the polished black stone whipped by wind and rain he remembered sitting in Bobby’s bunker reloading shells with Sam. He like the work, the steady rhythm of his hands.   
_“If he doesn’t exist fine… no rhyme or reason, I can roll that. But if he is out there, whats wrong with him. Where is he while all these innocent people get torn to shreds. Why doesn’t he help?”_   
He was so angry, the anger putting an edge to his movements. Sam said nothing. Dean carried that anger with him into asleep, and it was waiting for him when he woke onthe floor in the dead of night to find Castiel standing, arms braced against Bobby's kitchen counter, shoulders wide. Dean was angry, coiled, but he can still remember the soft blue light shining off the angel’s messy hair . The heavy brows folding in resignation over cool blue eyes.

_There is a god._ Cass said to him that night. _Lucifer is real_.   
Now, in the driving rain of Purgatory, Dean finally understood. All that mattered to him now was finding Cass, seeing the moon light shine off the dark curls around his eyes one more time. 

Over the next drawing of days Dean wandered across a volcanic flat of black and silver shine. A crater far to his right, a sheer lip rising up, hemming in a slow leech of black steam that cast the days in artificial twilight. As he walked he could see demons roaming on the horizons, he could hear their calls and screams in the dark. In the screams and the spaces between them Dean could feel Purgatory pulling at him. A thrum of heartbeats far away, a promise that to still them would bring peace.

Over three days and nights Dean made a blade, using the work to keep himsemlf from giving in to the call and remembering too much. He smashed smooth black stones together until he had a serrated shaled edge that he shaped, sharpened to transparency, humming with black. The work was hard, a heavy crushing task. His arms screamed from effort, his shoulders groaning like stripped hinges. He cut his hands and arms and soon his chest was streaked with blood as well as black dust and sweat.

The days were dark and hot, and he longed for another storm. At night he would sit in the dark and wait. He killed with the same brutal concentration with which he slammed rocks together, the same goles in mind. Do not give in. Do not remember. At sunrise he would drink water that tasted like lightning and flex his stiff and aching hands.

He lashed the blade in a split bone that fit comfortably in his hand, light and strong. That night nothing came near him, and exhaustion swallowed him in a long gulp, the blade held to his chest by crossed arms. As he fell asleep, howling in the distance, he thought that at sun up he would leave his nest of broken stones and find the Angel lost in Purgatory, bring them both home. In his hyponogogic rest, nothing could stop the memories from flooding him.

There were times back in the world when he would be sitting with Sam talking about a job, drinking a beer, driving along a quiet highway, when he would long for the sound of folding wings that announced Cass arrival. He missed his details. Details about angles that he had learned over the last few years: that they left no sent behind on blankets or clothes, that each of them arrived with a subtly different sound of rustling feathers like a finger print. And details about Cass himself. The sound of his voice, deep and closed. The heavy lidded blue eyes carrying burdens from eons Dean knew he would never understand. A warrior. Looking at his face, its gentle almost innocent beauty, it was easy to forget that.

The thought gave him comfort.  
A warrior could survive in Purgatory.

~

_When Castiel first laid a hand on you hell in was lost…_   
  
Hester’s wail woke him from an uneasy sleep, the silver chill of purgatory making him damp, he pulled his arms around himself closer, felt the stiffness in his back and shoulders. That it was true -- that everything that touched him withered and fell -- was a fear he could not hide from Purgatory, or the world, could not drown in scotch or fight out of his body. It rode with him through all his days. And now Cass was more lost then ever, alone in a sharp toothed silver trap, and it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter that everything Dean touched was pulled into hell or worse. It didn't matter that he was cursed. All that mattered was finding Cass. Dean know the angel of the lord - created to be nothing more than a warrior of God. He rebelled for him, broke rules for him, made exceptions for him. Castiel broke heaven’s hold for him. Angels were not supposed to feel. They were not supposed to need or want, cherish, or love. But Cass did. Cass felt - and that, to Dean, meant everything.

It drove every step he took in Purgatory towards him.

Over the years Dean saw more and more of himself in Cass. Both harbouring their fare share of self-loathing and self-doubt. Dean knew that Cass struggled with need, wanted someone to help guide him down the right path, because a times, at his most lost, Dean wanted this as well. But the best Dean could offer his friend was himself, the bond they shared with each other, whether their relationship was cursed or not.

He walked forward through the mist of dusk, leaving the stiffness of sleep behind. The temperatures dropped, and the air softened. He could smell rain, the slick electric smell of lightening. As he walked he looked up, watched the roiling gathering of dark green clouds, black and purple graced with light as they overlapped.

_No one cares that you’re broken._

His own voice, his words, angled to hurt. And they did. They hurt Cass, but they hurt him as well, stayed with him like hooks in his skin. There was little he could do to escape the things he said, regretted saying. He knew Cass had forgiven him, that soft half smile and gentle laugh when he said _I don’t want to make you uncomfortable…_ the depth of his voice, how it could be silken and rough at the same time made Dean shiver. _But I detect a note of forgiveness_. Dean wondered how much they never said, how many times they both looked away, closed their mouths. He wondered what they would have said if they opened them.

The blade and bone in his hand he began his bloody hunt for Cass.

Sometimes he would wonder at the sheer impossibility of it all, how a boy with toy solders and a mop of dark blond hair could have turned into a man who killed with grace and passion, who savoured the breath of battle and fight, savoured its sweetness, its bitterness. As he walked through the dense and reaching woods or scaled rock faces of black shale, sudden in the landscape and cold to the touch, he would puzzle over an american boy with a blade made from the stone and bone of purgatory. But most of the time, Dean did not think about himself. He didn’t think about anything except the desecrate moment before him, like a drop of water separated from a storm.

In the first days of his hunt, when he thought at all, his mind wandering in  honestly and strangeness, an unmoored drifting, Dean thought about Hell. The sky of chins, the wind of knives. Its shuddering screams, and worse, it silence. His own agony, the agony of others. Hell taught Dean Winchester a lot about pain, and breathing in the silver air of Purgatory the Hunter who knew about pain was a murderous thing.

He no longer hid at night, but waited, arms wide. The black plain of the volcano gave way to more tangled woods, brittle pale branches, tangled dark green laced with silver. He hunted in silence. He found them, or they found him. Dark shapes, sharp edges in the sunlight, always locked in violence. They fell to him, to some drum beat that sounded in his blood, in the dying whispers of their hearts that called him on.

Before they died he asked them one question.   
“Where is Castiel, the angel of the Lord?”   
Some didn’t answer. Some lied. Some spit cursed him, blood on their lips, laughing. But all of them fell to his blade.

Dean stood over his latest kill, the demon had laughed at his words. _Not even Angels can save you, meat bag_. His blade lodged deep in its chest, so that he had to haul the blade out of the nest of collapsing ribs with a gunt of effort. His mouth set in a grim pale line. Hie mind was full of Cass blue eyes, flecked with a sadness. 

Maybe that was why he didn’t see him.

Purgatory could do that, catch an idle thought on silver wind and and pull him down. It could make a moments thought, a swing of his weapon, feel like hours of consideration, precise and vivid. Silver tunnel vision. Maybe that was why Dean didn’t see the vampire in the trees. Or maybe it was simple then that, maybe he was just exhausted, stripped to his bones with fatigue.

At the last moment Dean saw him, tried to raise his weapon, but it was too late and the lithe speeding body slammed into him, the force rocking through his joints, the blade falling from his grip and both he and the vampire were driven to the ground. He smacked his head against hard packed earth and saw blue orbs burst in the corners of his vision and all the air exploded out of his lungs. Purgatories slow silver grip still closed on his perception. He saw the demons gnashing fangs, a back row of filed teeth, mouth smeared with blood like a festering wound. He saw the gleam in its black eyes, matched only by it viciousness, by the claw like curl of its hands.

_He made you weak. You let him make you weak._

A treacherous voice whispered deep inside him, and Dean fought it down with more rage and determination then he fought the vampire at his throat. He would not die regretting the only good thing he had ever done, the one good thing he had left of himself, a hallow canyon of destruction. He did not take the time to wonder what this meant or why he thought it, only that it was important that this be the last thing he think: _Cass is mine, and it is good. I died looking for him, and it was the best I could do_.

Purgatory’s twist of perception loosened its grip on him and time snapped back, frantic. There as a streak of moment, as fast as his fear and the Vampire was pulled away from him with the sound of a hard bracing growl and a solid wet crack.


End file.
